The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

In the mid-nineteenth century, surgery was a butchering art. Operations were performed at brutal speed, without anesthesia at first and always without any understanding of infection; patients who survived the knife often died days later of "hospital gangrene" in wards that surgeons entered in blood-stiffened coats worn as badges of experience. Into this world came Joseph Lister, a thoughtful young surgeon who could not accept that so many deaths were simply the price of the trade.

Lindsey Fitzharris follows Lister from the dissection rooms and operating theaters of Victorian Britain to his revolutionary embrace of Louis Pasteur's germ theory. Convinced that invisible microorganisms, not "bad air," caused post-surgical infection, Lister developed antiseptic methods, using carbolic acid and rigorous cleanliness, against the skepticism and outright hostility of his peers.

The Butchering Art is a vivid work of popular history and biography that doubles as a portrait of an era. Grisly, humane, and briskly told, it charts the hard-won transformation of surgery from a gamble with death into the foundation of modern medicine.